The swift infiltration of the internet into our daily lives has led to an increase in online customers who demand prompt and safe delivery of their packages at affordable shipping costs. A Grand View Research of the online shopping pattern shows that most shoppers don’t proceed to checkout because of late shipping. Considering this scenario, e-commerce platforms had to get creative to shorten their turnaround time, and that’s where warehousing and fulfillment services come into play.
The 21st-century customer seeks quick and easy means to acquire their packages. The first e-commerce business to realize the efficiency of a dropshipping warehouse in geographic target shipping was Amazon. Soon, other platforms followed, and now warehousing and fulfillment services are integral to all e-commerce business models.
Consequently, the global market size for warehousing and fulfillment services is growing at a CAGR rate of 7% and 9.5%, respectively. By 2030, the fulfillment services market is expected to be worth $198.62 Bn, whereas the warehousing industry is anticipating a value of $326 Bn in 2024.
If you are interested in cutting down on your shipping time and scaling your business internationally, this post on the best warehousing and fulfilling services is just for you.
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What Are Warehousing and Fulfillment Services?
Warehousing is a centuries-old practice essential for anything that requires inventory. Modern warehousing allows merchants to hire companies to store and care for their merchandise until they need it. These companies have large industrial spaces and equipment like containers and forklifts to stack and move around your inventory.
Fulfillment services are the logistics part of a supply chain taking place in a fulfillment center. Everything you need to do to get your product from your warehouse to your customer takes place in a fulfillment center and is part of fulfillment services.
The fulfillment process includes receiving merchandise, keeping tabs on a pick list, assembling items, packing, labelling boxes, and shipping the product to your customer.
However, e-commerce businesses no longer need a physical place to store merchandise or hire staff to pack, label, and ship their products. They can simply hire one of the best warehousing and fulfillment services available in the market to take care of their online orders.
Merchants can store their inventory in a warehouse for as long as they want and then ship their products straight from the warehouse to their customer’s doorstep. The fulfillment service providers will send the package using your labels, logo, and address on the box, leaving the customer none the wiser.
Warehousing and fulfillment services can help small and medium-sized enterprises scale and accelerate their operations globally. Entrepreneurs and business owners looking to sell their products but don’t have the capital to hire staff or rent a warehouse can benefit greatly from these services.
The Benefit of Warehousing and Fulfillment Services
When you hire a company for warehousing and fulfillment, you still need to provide it with products to store and ship. The process of purchasing merchandise and shipping it to the warehouse or a fulfillment center can be as daunting as the logistics bit, especially when you’ve just started your business.
Warehousing and fulfillment services have already streamlined the e-commerce business model, but with dropshipping into the mix, you’ll have a hands-off e-commerce working model on your hand.
Dropshipping is a widely adopted retail practice that allows merchants to meet the growing customer demand with the help of a third-party supplier. All you need to do is provide the supplier with the pick lists, and they’ll have your order ready in due time. You don’t need to make any purchases, stack up inventory or worry about customization; your supplier will take care of everything.
Additionally, the localized positions of these dropshipping warehouses and advancements in packaging technology help merchants reduce their turnaround time.
Relationship Between Dropshipping, Warehousing, and Fulfillment
A third-party supplier and their dropshipping warehouse provide the same services as a normal warehouse with fulfillment services and then some. you can stock your hot-selling products and send them to the warehouse to keep the supply chain running in rush hours or seasons.
Most dropshipping suppliers usually don’t have minimum order requirements, so you can order in bulk and singles depending on the frequency of your orders. Simply put, a dropshipping warehouse never runs out of stock and provides you with just what you need immediately.
Why Do You Need Warehousing and Fulfillment Services?
An e-commerce merchant using all three working models can achieve maximum efficiency by streamlining its supply chain, logistics, and inventory in one loop.
When you have a third-party supplier ready to supply and store inventory with e-commerce integration, you can redirect your resources and time to marketing and bringing in sales.
How to Find A Warehouse Fulfillment Center?
Finding a warehouse fulfillment center for your dropshipping business is easy when you know what you are looking for or how you want to improve your business model. If you are not sure you need a third-party warehousing and fulfillment service, you can try to ask yourself the following question:
- Are you struggling to scale your business because of limited inventory?
- Do you find it impossible to cut down on shipping costs?
- Does it take forever for you to ship the products to your customers?
After that, if you find that you need a third-party company to stock your product and fulfill your order. You can search for a professional warehouse fulfillment center offering the following services:
Tracking for Shipment: A fulfillment center that allows your customers to track their packages shortly after dispatch can make things easy for your customer service. The faster you know where your shipment is, the easier it will be for you to focus on other operations.
Shipping Methods & Costs: Choose a warehousing supplier that offers multiple shipping methods with competitive pricing. The diversification in shipping methods will allow you to switch and expand in more than one way. Customers like variety in shipping methods as it enables them to budget their purchase down to the cents of its shipping cost.
Global Dropshipping Warehouse: Global warehouses are necessary for reducing the turnaround time of your dropshipping business. You can stock your products in local warehouses of your service provider instead of shipping inventory from Europe or other expensive regions after receiving orders. Most merchants ship their products in bulk to regional warehouses and then ship locally as they receive orders.
Best Warehousing and Fulfillment Services
There are hundreds and thousands of third-party fulfillment centers in the world. Even though their introduction is perfect, you can not make sure of the actual situation when they work for you. And testing one by one can be wasting time and money.
For this, we want to recommend our partner who supports us in global dropshipping business – EPROLO. It is an all-inclusive supply chain catering to dropshipping, print-on-demand, 3PL, warehousing fulfillment, and so on for e-commerce merchants worldwide.
What is EPROLO Warehousing and Fulfillment Services?
EPROLO order fulfillment and shipping services allow them to source inventory and dropship merchandise internationally.
With the EPROLO fulfillment service, you can ship the inventory to their warehouse for storage after purchasing them from your supplier. Alternatively, you can buy your stock directly from EPROLO and keep it in the warehouse.
EPROLO has 26+ global shipping warehouses that help you maintain competitive pricing for air, sea, and local shipping. Furthermore, its fulfillment center provides a tracking number for your package in 2 hours and processes it for logistics in 6 hours.
To utilize the EPROLO drop shipping warehouse and fulfillment service, you can integrate your e-commerce stores with its websites.
It provides e-commerce integration with WooCommerce, Shopify, AliExpress, eBay, Amazon, and Shopline to facilitate your dropshipping business. Once integrated, the order will be synced to the platform automatically and fulfilled by EPROLO.
How Does EPROLO Warehousing and Fulfillment Services Work?
Whether you purchase from another supplier or EPROLO, you can send the inventory to EPROLO global warehouses. They will fulfill your daily orders with the private inventory.
Generally, Europe and Asia-Pacific warehouses receive stock in 100 pieces, whereas stock for China warehouses must be more than ten pieces.
Furthermore, EPROLO also supports FBA prep warehouse, labeling, and sourcing for Amazon or Walmart sellers. When you sell on your Amazon store and work with the FBM network, it can be your third-party order-fulfilling partner to source, pack, and ship the products to your customers.
The processing fee for China warehouses differs depending on the package type. If the item needs a cardboard box, it will range from $0.3 / SKU for a product weighing 0.1 hg to $1.5 / SKU for a product weighing 10 kg.
For the same weight, an item without cardboard box packaging will cost $0.2 / SKU and $1.3 / SKU. This pricing accounts for all packing consumables, including tapes, cartons, paper, bags, plastic, etc.
The first 90 days of storage are free in China warehouses. However, from day 91, merchants will have to pay $0.20 for their stock. The price will jump to $0.30 on day 121, $.40 on day 151, and $0.50 on day 181.
If you are not receiving new orders on your stock and don’t want to pay its storage fee, you can always ask EPROLO to destroy it for free. However, we suggest going down the destruction route only after exhausting all resources.
EPROLO can return your stock to the supplier if they are ready to accept it, but that’ll cost you a processing fee of $0.5 per kg plus the shipping cost. If you’ve purchased your stock from an EPROLO supplier, it can negotiate with them on your behalf.
The rules for overseas merchants are different; we suggest visiting EPROLO website to understand the pricing difference.
Conclusion
Running an e-commerce business is not everyone’s cup of tea, especially when inventory is part of the equation. Even the most sound businessman finds it hard to predict the supply and demand of their products because of the uncertain circumstances of a post-pandemic world.
If you are an entrepreneur just starting out, you’ll try to keep out of business models like renting a warehouse and hiring staff for packing and shipping when you don’t have enough funds to pay them.
The easiest way to run a no-risk e-commerce business is by adopting dropshipping working model and hiring a third-party logistics company like EPROLO for their warehousing and fulfillment services. They offer e-commerce integration for the leading platforms and fulfill your orders as quickly as you lock them via sales and marketing.
